Brandon Bell
Staff Writer
The election for the Student Government Association’s (SGA) Executive Board closed last Friday, and three new officers have been elected for next year, all pushing for changes in the SGA and for improved communication between students and the administration.
As of press time, Margaret Sestito ’18 had been elected president, Jordan Ouellette ’18 had been elected vice-president and Brandon Borges ’19 had been elected secretary. These results were pending review by the SGA at their meeting last Wednesday.
All of the three have been members of student government since their first year at the College. Sestito and Ouellette, both rising seniors, previously served together as co-chairs of the Student Advocacy Committee.
“[Jordan and I] have a lot of energy and enthusiasm when it comes to helping make Wooster a more vibrant campus and a better community,” Sestito said. “I am really motivated by the problems that I want to fix.”
“Maggie and I have served on SGA together since our freshman year,” Ouellette said. “We thought that running for president and vice-president would allow us to use this experience to work well as a team.”
Both share concerns about the state of communication between students and the administration. In the biographies each candidate submitted for the online ballot, they addressed ways in which these connections and Wooster’s transparency as an institution could improve. Sestito, for example, advocated cooperation between student groups so that they could achieve more in regard to campus policy. She also noted that last year she had met with Nathan Fein, director of Residence Life, once a week to keep up to date with new policies.
“This is the type of thing I would like to see grow,” she said. “Conversations taking place concerning various aspects of campus will help improve communication over all.”
According to Ouellette, SGA is currently trying to arrange similar meetings with deans of the College.
“We would like to continue to stress that students just want to know about changes that are being made before they happen, and not after,” Ouellette said, calling the lack of communication a “huge issue.”
“Sometimes these policies are in our best interests, but as a student body we need to know that they are set in place,” she said.
Another concern was improving participation in student government. Borges wants to push for involvement as secretary.
“Students are able to quite significantly affect the actions of SGA … if they access the channels SGA currently has to communicate with students,” Borges said, and called on SGA to “make [its] mark and potential impact more well-known” in his biography through better public relations. He noted that SGA tabled with a suggestion box in Lowry and regularly held open meetings.
Sestito agreed that changing the perception of SGA would encourage student involvement. In order to improve efficiency, she advocated giving SGA committees more focused missions, saying that they were currently “spread too thin” around broad campus issues.
“I will be the first to admit that SGA has a reputation on campus of being rather ineffective at times,” Sestito said. “I want to change that.”